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5 Pinterest Tips for Beginners

A fresh new year can mean a fresh new start in your social media strategy. Get off on the right foot with this simple guide containing 5 tips to help you start growing your Pinterest audience effectively.

1. Invest Heavily in Images

This isn’t to say you need to find a huge budget to buy stock photos all the time. Instead, small and large-budgets can both benefit from taking great snazzy photos from their smartphone to help tell their story. Having beautiful photos on your website pages is the #1 thing that’s going to get Pinterest users back onto your site. (Remember you can’t pin anything without an image, and people love sharing good images and photos.) A successful Pinterest strategy starts here.

2. Add Social Buttons

If you want your website pages to be easily shared by your visitors, you have to make it Pinnable and give them a quick way to do so. Adding social sharing buttons to your website is key to making that happen, but also having the right open graph tags set on your site so that the right title and descriptions show up in all your visitors’ pins. And not only buttons for your website; include sharing buttons in your emails, too!

Follow buttons are another way to spread the word about your Pinterest boards, too. Link to your Pinterest profile on your website so you can gain followers in one click.

3. Act as a Community Member

Pinners found most success when they A) actively pinned on their boards, and B) openly shared with other pinners. It’s such a strong community that it does take some time investment to get your content noticed and shared by others. Pinterest’s Guide for Businesses explicitly states that you should engage with other pinners by pinning their content, pinning your content (daily), and commenting on other people’s pins.

4. Pin Trends and Unique Items

Pinterest is adored by its users because of how easily they’re exposed to the latest trends in fashion, crafts, and cooking. When a unique or highly trendy pin is posted, you can be sure to see an awesome reaction by the community.

Seasonal trends are no exception. In fact, in the last 30 days, we saw personal seasonal recipes top the chart in most shared content to Pinterest! And characteristics of these top Pinnable pages include a delicious picture, printable recipe format, and sharing buttons.

5. Engage Influence Pinners

Community strategy 101: find and engage with pinners that can help broaden your Pinterest reach. We had an expert at loop88 give us the skinny on how influence on Pinterest works, and what that means for a brand that wants to grow in that community. Have that post handy when you start exploring for an influencer community.

There are tons of resources out there, but this short and basic list should get you started. And speaking of getting started, get your content shared with the right set of sharing buttons on your website and newsletters!